Nashville-based lawyer Dan Beasley started his own side business three years ago and has over 1,000 customers today.
His side gig, or “labor of love”, is extraordinarily targeted at a niche he’s deeply familiar with: lawyers.
Like the genesis of most businesses, Beasley saw a problem with CLE, Continuing Legal Education, a mandate that all legal professionals need to continue learning in their field to maintain their licenses to practice law. In the state of Tennessee, for example, the CLE requirement is 15 hours a year.
“CLE is like watching paint dry,” said Beasley. “It’s miserable.”
He partnered with his friend who ran Outkick the Coverage, a popular sports news site with over 20 million monthly visitors and 500,000 Twitter followers, to create Outkick CLE, a fun and engaging way to gain CLE credit for lawyers. The 1-hour courses sell for $50 each, or $200 for unlimited access per year, and cover interesting and time-relevant legal topics like bitcoin and blockchain, marijuana laws, and “basically anyone Tim Ferris interviews,” said Beasley, “We reach out and see if there’s a legal angle to explore.”
The Secret Sauce to Getting the Word Out
If you’re a small business owner, you know the hard part about building a business is not necessarily building the business but is marketing — getting the word out to the right prospects and converting them into customers.
For Beasley, he had a clever silver bullet for reaching new customers. We’ll explain what it is below without giving away his secret.
“Lawyers are pretty old school still,” he said and knew direct mail would be an effective way to reach his target audience. But he knew a blanket mailer about Outkick CLE to all lawyers in Tennessee would not only be expensive but also be inefficient because a large number of lawyers would have had already completed their hours.
Without giving it away, Beasley leveraged a well-known “industry event” to identify exactly which lawyers still needed CLE hours.
The list had their names and mailing addresses. That’s it.
After looking at local print shops, he found Click2Mail through a Google search and wrote up a “very vanilla letter” with text only, inviting lawyers to try Outkick CLE to maintain their licensure.
The results
“We were pretty happy,” said Beasley, pulling up his spreadsheet while we were on the phone. “We received 4–5x our money back.”
To track the effectiveness of the mailer, Beasley included a special coupon code for customers to input on the website when purchasing a course. He also cross-referenced any new customers with the mailing list to account for anyone who forgot or didn’t use the coupon code. “We found 3.6% of the list became customers from one letter.”
Beasley said he’s getting more bullish on print mail overall. He calls himself a closet marketer and secretly enjoys the art and science of copywriting. He follows folks like Neville Medhora, Jay Abraham, and other big-time copywriters who say print mail will help pull a 7x ROI.
The takeaway: If you have a good list, and write a good letter, chances are, direct mail will accomplish your goals.
Beasley plans to do 2–3 more direct mail campaigns before the end of the year and if they continue to perform as well as before, he said he could see himself sending out letters once a month.
How about you, reader? Time to try a mailer? Give us a call and we’ll help you find a good list and write a good letter so that you can get similar results for your business like Beasley did for his.
Give us a call at 866-665-2787 or visit us at https://click2mail.com/contact-us-support to learn more.
